Cringe Is Sooo Cringe

In an empty warehouse, Timothée Chalamet slouches on a swivel chair, wearing a hoodie and jeans. He is lit from behind by a screen — it must be at least forty feet tall — which displays slo-mo videos of Bob Dylan’s face before switching to a series of black-on-white texts. When “congratulations timmothee” flashes on the screen (yes, with his name spelled incorrectly), Chalamet points both arms to the air in triumph.

Over the course of this 13:29 minute Instagram livestream shared just days before “A Complete Unknown” was released in theaters, Chalamet smashes a guitar, submerges his head in a sink, shoots off several confetti cannons, sings and dances to “I Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas, sheds his hoodie and tank top, and finally exits the warehouse entirely — leaving the cameraman trailing behind him.

Then, it ends. There’s no explanation, no press release, no click-here-for-more advertisement. Chalamet refuses to lean on the security of irony or the comfort of a fourth wall break — not even in the caption of the posted recording, which reads, “timmy’s livestream that aired at 3:16pm pacific standard time on 12/23/2024!”

Watching this livestream, I was one of many viewers whose instinctual reaction was: “cringe.”

At no point does Chalamet state that the broadcast is humorous — if anything, the tone is earnest. Without any explanation or pre-existing discourse, the audience is left vulnerable in deciding for themselves whether Chalamet’s supposed sincerity makes the project cringe. Thus, I levy the judgment of “cringe” with significant hesitation.

Calling something on the internet cringe is like bringing a gun to a knife fight. “Cringe” levels empires. It brings down even — especially — the most earnest, compelling, experimental artworks and arguments. From political statements to apology videos, calling something cringe has become a legitimate way to avoid the hassle of thoughtful criticism. It can be wielded against everyone and everything in equal measure, from early-career artists and household names to entire fandoms and civic campaigns. Cringe is the weapon of digital warfare and the final word of constructive online debate.

Cringe-slinging (a.k.a. digital gun-slinging) trolls have stamped out genuine expression in many corners of the internet. Trends and topics online have half-lives of legitimate popularity before they inevitably decay into something cringe. Everything becomes cringe — skinny jeans, the renegade, even brands of water. It seems as though the way to avoid decaying into cringe is if you’re never sincere in the first place. Especially in the world of comedy and entertainment, you can express earnest creativity, but only through an ironically self-aware tone. Today’s humor relies on a hyper self-reflexive examination of its content within the medium itself. The conscious indulgence of overperformance is irony within irony, so that the audience is never quite sure what expression is genuine and what is parody.

And the power of “cringe” extends offline, too. The creed to avoid cringeness explains much of what Gen Z is known (and hated) for: being cringe-free means being anti-hustle, anti-9-to-5, and pro-Gen-Z-stare. I’m no exception. You’ll absolutely find me wearing sweats to class and quoting memes to explain complex emotions. In many ways, I love our generation’s mandatory casualness — we employ “cringe” to keep each other from taking life too seriously. At the same time, though, I know our anti-cringe attitudes take effort. This is especially evident at Harvard, where students who are known for their passion, drive, and enthusiasm have to go to great lengths to avoid being “too chalant.”

At the same time, explicit “nonchalance” has become too mainstream to remain a get-out-of-cringe-free card. Now, the nonchalant aesthetic is also cringe, acquiring its own name and spectacle as the “performative male.” So on and on the roundabout goes — we are desperate to participate while self-conscious of following the crowd; we seek authenticity yet pounce on it when it gains traction; we comment “you know what hell yeah,” but only as a bit. There is no such thing as escaping the irony once we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, all we can do is add more layers of comedy until we ourselves don’t know what is sincere.

If I needed to give an optimistic interpretation of the cultural ubiquitousness of “cringe,” I could argue that it acts as a normalizing force for a generation that has retained few social etiquettes. But the argument in favor of norms rings of #BringBackBullying discourse, where bullies are praised for holding the reins of teenagers’ exploration and self-expression. I find this line of thinking abhorrent, especially since the hashtag is often brandished against queer expression, artistic pursuits, and civic engagement.

Mostly, I’m cognizant of how the universalizable metric of cringe confuses our collective ability to care — a challenge that is especially noticeable for celebrities. It’s fascinating how these public figures attempt to reconcile their necessarily try-hard professions with their online personas. Some artists handle this conflict by downplaying their commitment, like Harrison Ford calling his own character ridiculous during the “Captain America: Brave New World” press tour and telling one interviewer that his Marvel paycheck is all that kept him from feeling like an “idiot” while acting for the role. Other artists take a preemptive approach and make cringe part of their brand, like Taylor Swift telling NYU graduates to “live alongside cringe” or Donald Glover telling his younger self to “simp hard for life.”

With well-established creatives molding their public image around the looming threat of cringeness, Timothée Chalamet’s aggressive and unapologetic chalant-ness is all the more surprising. “I want to be one of the greats,” he announced in a SAG Award speech earlier this year. Though this speech prompted criticism and discussion online, the comments, generally, were shockingly supportive. In fact, when one daytime talk show host called him a brat, the internet masses leveled “cringe” in comments against the host, not Chalamet. The internet seems to adore Chalamet despite — or perhaps because of — his confronting earnestness.

There is some specific magic about Chalamet that allows him to post an indecipherable livestream or an openly ambitious speech without the internet deciding he is cringeworthy. Perhaps it’s that he’s genuinely good at his art. Perhaps it’s the quirkiness of his public persona — he rides Lime bikes to premieres and brings beyblades to red carpets. Perhaps it’s because he participates in the internet seemingly without allowing it to dictate his online personality or his offline relationship to his work.

To me it seems that, intentionally or not, Chalamet has transcended cringe by capitalizing on its confused, post-ironic state. Swift, Glover, and Ford are still responding to some previous mutation of cringe, back when it was a unidirectional critique of try-hards. But with Chalamet, it’s rarely clear what is farcical and serious. When he sings along to “Non, Je ne regrette rien” in front of the Eiffel Tower — refusing to address his audience or give insight into his motivations — the internet masses can’t tell if it’s ironic or not. One wonders if Chalamet himself knows.

Chalamet’s beloved presence online exemplifies the slow collapse of shallow, mob-like critique into itself — where calling something cringe might be just as cringe, so cringe begins to lose all meaning. Its universal power is decaying, and I think that tells us something about the maturity of the internet.

For a school assignment, I once asked my dad what he considers to be the most significant world event in his lifetime. I expected him to talk about terrorist attacks or global pandemics, but he instead answered that it was the announcement of the iPhone — when I was two years old — that has changed the world most profoundly.

My dad, and even my friends just a few years older than me, can remember a time before the modern universality of the internet. My younger siblings, on the other hand, are being raised with the regulation and supervision of parents who have read “The Anxious Generation.” But there’s a specific age group, loosely Generation Z, that has truly grown up alongside the modern digital age — and we’re currently college-aged and entering the workforce.

We are the only adults who have always known a world where social norms are transient between our in-person and digital experiences. “Cringe” is the ultimate example of the unique culture and vocabulary birthed from this overlap. Even if we can’t explain what cringiness is, we know it in our bones because we’ve been literate in internet-speak our entire lives. The interchange of these fears between online and in-person spaces blurs the line between worlds, making the internet feel like “real life” as much as or more than physical space does.

The iPhone is 18 years old, Facebook is 21, Instagram not quite 15. I’m told that the pre-smartphone internet was upfront, DIY, exploratory, and childlike in its self-defining creativity. Children’s metrics of right and wrong — of good and bad, of cringe and acceptable — are simple. Today’s omnipresent, universally connected Web 2.0 is like us college students: new to adulthood, and trying to make room for the gray areas and inconsistencies of real life. Everyone online is still trying to figure out what it means to have constant access to crowd-sourced judgment of each other. On social media, everyone’s digital selves are still young and irresponsible, only beginning to formulate the rights and responsibilities of internet citizenship.

That is to say: the way the internet is now, and the way it shapes our generation’s norms, doesn’t have to remain true. Like a locker room bully graduating high school, the internet might still grow up to be something genuine and substantive. If anything, the online adoration of Chalamet demonstrates our subconscious awareness of the limits that “cringe” places on excellence.

I’d like to think we’ll look back on this cringe-obsessed teenage era of the digital world, and we’ll cringe.

—Associate Magazine Editor Kate Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com. Her column “The Meta-Internet” examines internet phenomena to explore the tensions we embody through life online